For a while Visual Studio 2005 Team Architect Edition [VSTESA] and Microsoft Operations manager 2005 [MOM] where the only “technical” visible products from Microsoft with their SOAP based SDM language who implement this DSI/ALM vision from Microsoft. But with the current release wave of new products [SCCM2007, SCOM2007, Visual Studio Team System 2008], the work from the Patterns and Practice group and the ability to customize them this vision of Dynamic Systems and Application Livecycle Management gets a boost.

Within the work I’m doing with Team Architect and the Service Factory Modeling Edition you already have some Dynamic Systems benefits. For example next to better communication between solution architects and developers, better communication with infrastructure architects and solution architects… also the red marked points from this list [founded in the Dynamic Systems 2007: Get Started With Dynamic Systems Technology Today whitepaper]

So, with Team Architect and the factories we’ve got less complexity, more communication and more control of our systems during the development.

But ALM - DSI is also about operations “the yellow marked text”. We need to enable our services and applications for operational support. One solution to accomplish this, is to make the code-generation a little bit more intelligent that it also generates some logging and that kind of functionality. But operation specific decisions should be made by the operations department and not by the factory designer!

So, it should be better to have a viewpoint from where the operation manager can design [together with the solution architect] the Health Model for the system.
Microsoft already has such a tool the “Microsoft Management Model Designer” .

“The Microsoft Management Model Designer (MMD) is a tool for developing management models. Management models provide a way to represent all of the areas of manageability for applications and systems services”

“patterns & practices project focused on developing tools and guidance to help enable the development of highly manageable applications on the Windows platform.”

The “vsmmd” model just looks like the application diagram from Team Architect and my first thoughts where… why not put that information / functionality in the AD. Put on second sight this is a great viewpoint, you have a single focus and can discuse operations in a much cleaner way when you have them in a spearated model, and the AD will get to complex.

So, what would be the scenario when you also integrate health modeling in your design and development proces. See the red steps, I’ve added them to my excisting one…

Red 1: generate the “vsmmd” model from the application diagram and define:
trust levels for the Application
Instrumentation for the Application
Health Definitions

Red 2: Import the definitions in Microsoft Management Model Designer, these models can then be used by System Center / MOM Red 4

Red 3: Generate together with the Service models our “operations ready” services.

This is just a fictive walkthrough, there is no source code available from the DFO designers. But it would be really nice and this will be a next step to implement / adopt the Dynamic Systems Imitative [DSI] and Application Lifecycle Management [ALM].

With this it’s a small step to make Security models [viewpoints] for your applications, performance models… and all the other no-functional requirements.

Anyway, still enough work to do but I like the idea’s More Viewpoint Models is More and Better Communication..!